Confederate engineer Gen. Danville Leadbetter had no luck at all finding slaveholders willing to loan him their slave laborers to finish Fort Sanders, and so it remained only roughed-out when the Union took Knoxville.

The planters of Alabama were just as reluctant to provide slaves to aid Leadbetter when he worked on Mobile’s defenses. But he did manage to collect more than a hundred. They weren’t sufficient, but they were better than he got in East Tennessee.